Juno Online Services - AbsoluteAstronomy.com

Juno is an Internet service provider

Internet service provider

An Internet service provider is a company that provides access to the Internet. Access ISPs directly connect customers to the Internet using copper wires, wireless or fiber-optic connections. Hosting ISPs lease server space for smaller businesses and host other people servers...

based in the United States. It is a subsidiary of United Online

United Online

United Online is a public company formed by the 2001 merger of NetZero and Juno Online Services. The company's range of products and services has evolved significantly since inception, primarily through a series of acquisitions that have included Classmates Online , MyPoints and FTD Group, Inc. ....

, which also owns NetZero

NetZero

NetZero is an Internet service provider based in Woodland Hills, Los Angeles, California. It is a subsidiary of United Online, owner of Juno Online Services and BlueLight Internet Services. The current chairman, president, and CEO of United Online is Mark Goldston.- History :NetZero launched in...

and Kmart

Kmart

Kmart, sometimes styled as "K-Mart," is a chain of discount department stores. The chain acquired Sears in 2005, forming a new corporation under the name Sears Holdings Corporation. The company was founded in 1962 and is the third largest discount store chain in the world, behind Wal-Mart and...

's BlueLight internet service.

History

Juno was founded in May 1996 by Charles Ardai

Charles Ardai

Charles Ardai is an entrepreneur, writer, editor, and television producer. He is best known as founder and CEO of Juno, an Internet company, and founder and editor of Hard Case Crime, a line of pulp-style paperback crime novels.-Biography:...

, with equity capital provided by the D.E. Shaw Group and headquarters in the same Midtown Manhattan

Midtown Manhattan

Midtown Manhattan, or simply Midtown, is an area of Manhattan, New York City home to world-famous commercial zones such as Rockefeller Center, Broadway, and Times Square...

building as Shaw. In August 1996, it began a free e-mail

E-mail

Electronic mail, commonly known as email or e-mail, is a method of exchanging digital messages from an author to one or more recipients. Modern email operates across the Internet or other computer networks. Some early email systems required that the author and the recipient both be online at the...

service–a customer would install the proprietary Juno client which would allow them to send and receive email of about 35 kilobytes in size. Version 1 did not offer attachments or other features. The user could write emails with the Juno client and would periodically sign in by dial-up. Upon doing so, the Juno client would upload any emails the user had written, download any new incoming emails in the online mailbox, and download targeted advertisements, which were displayed in the client. This was similar to "QWK" and similar less automated offline reader

Offline reader

An offline reader is computer software that downloads e-mail, newsgroup posts or web pages, making them available when the computer is offline: not connected to the Internet or, in the late 20th century, bulletin board systems...

s had been used for years by BBSes to save phone line connect time.

In June 1998, Juno expanded its service to offer premium support for paying subscribers, and added the ability to not only use email, but browse the web. In December 1999, Juno began to offer the same service (minus technical support) for free, provided the user ran the Juno client, which displayed a bar containing advertisements for the majority of the time that the user was online. Juno later placed limits on how much its free internet service could be used in a month. Free service is currently limited to a maximum of 10 hours per month.

With the collapse of the turn of the century Dot-com bubble

Dot-com bubble

The dot-com bubble was a speculative bubble covering roughly 1995–2000 during which stock markets in industrialized nations saw their equity value rise rapidly from growth in the more...

, advertising revenues declined and the company shifted emphasis to offering discount Web and mail services similar to large ISPs, but at half the price.

Juno stock began trading on NASDAQ in May 1999, under the symbol JWEB. In June 2001, Juno and NetZero

NetZero

announced a merger. The two had been in litigation over the patent held by Netzero to provide free internet access by using an Ad bar. Netzero had the patent but Juno, with 6 Million members, was far larger. Eventually they choose to merge rather than continue to fight in court. By September 2001, the two companies were merged into United Online

United Online

and both JWEB and NZRO were delisted.

Proprietary client

The client software was updated many times in the late 1990s. Version 1.49 was final for Windows 3.1, except for a date problem that was fixed in version 1.51. Versions 4.0.11 and 5.0.33 were final for Windows 95 and later. Version 4 had attachments and a spell checker, and displayed fonts and colors. For old messages, it had storage folders, each stored in a separate file containing up to 1000 messages.

Version 5 added an ineffective integral twit/spam filter

E-mail filtering

Email filtering is the processing of email to organize it according to specified criteria. Most often this refers to the automatic processing of incoming messages, but the term also applies to the intervention of human intelligence in addition to anti-spam techniques, and to outgoing emails as well...

and the ability to write messages in chosen fonts and colors with inline images. It stored its old messages in a different format, with one large file for all messages. When disk free space was not several times larger than the message file, it often suffered "folder collapse" in which all messages returned to the "Inbox" or disappeared.

As of December 1, 2004, use of an e-mail client such as the Juno client, Microsoft Outlook Express

Outlook Express

Outlook Express is an email and news client that is included with Internet Explorer versions 4.0 through 6.0. As such, it is also bundled with several versions of Microsoft Windows, from Windows 98 to Windows Server 2003, and is available for Windows 3.x, Windows NT 3.51, Windows 95 and Mac OS 9...

, or Eudora

Eudora (e-mail client)

Eudora is an e-mail client used on the Apple Macintosh and Microsoft Windows operating systems. It also supports several palmtop computing platforms, including Newton and the Palm OS....

is no longer free. Users who wish to use an e-mail client instead of Juno's web-based e-mail interface must either pay for Juno Platinum or Juno Megamail.

The Juno client software version 5.0 build 33 would not work with Internet Explorer

Internet Explorer

Windows Internet Explorer is a series of graphical web browsers developed by Microsoft and included as part of the Microsoft Windows line of operating systems, starting in 1995. It was first released as part of the add-on package Plus! for Windows 95 that year...

7. However, by the time Microsoft released the final version of IE7, Juno had released Juno 5.0 build 49, which resolves the issues with IE7 and makes it compatible with Windows Vista.
Version 8, compatible with Windows 7, was released in 2009. The proprietary mailers were only slightly supported in the 21st century, and users were expected to use POP3 standard mail clients.

Juno Turbo

Juno has released (along with NetZero) a service that purports to make the web browsing faster. The only noticeable change is the ability to display pictures at lower resolutions, thereby speeding up page loads.

Complaints

No version of Juno's offline mail reader was made to use third party utilities to scan for viruses, clean out E-mail spam

E-mail spam

Email spam, also known as junk email or unsolicited bulk email , is a subset of spam that involves nearly identical messages sent to numerous recipients by email. Definitions of spam usually include the aspects that email is unsolicited and sent in bulk. One subset of UBE is UCE...

among messages already downloaded. Versions 5 and 8 can weed downloaded email messages individually by exact email address matches; there are no wildcards, boolean exclusion-filters or routing features. The company opened a spamdesk to help screen spam at the servers, thus minimizing the amount of spam received by the Juno client.

Exporting e-mails and addresses

While the Juno client software can back up e-mails and addresses, it does not support exporting these to other clients, nor do other clients support importing from Juno. Only a few third party utilities were made that could do anything with the proprietary message storage format. Users must use third party applications

Third-party software component

In computer programming, a third-party software component is a reusable software component developed to be either freely distributed or sold by an entity other than the original vendor of the development platform...

to convert and export the data, principally juno5bdb for messages (which Juno stores in a Berkeley DB

Berkeley DB

Berkeley DB is a computer software library that provides a high-performance embedded database for key/value data. Berkeley DB is a programmatic software library written in C with API bindings for C++, PHP, Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Tcl, Smalltalk, and most other programming languages...

), and Dawn for addresses.

Juno Supercomputer

In 2001, Juno enacted a new version of their privacy policy. By continuing to use the service, customers implicitly agreed to allow Juno to harvest any unused CPU cycles.
The plan was to assemble a Quasi Supercomputer using the customer's processors, and then sell out time on the supercomputer to private companies that may want to use it. This additional revenue was to keep the company afloat after the dot-com bubble.
Most customers did not notice the change of terms. It is unclear whether Juno followed through on this plan.

Development centers

Juno also has an offshore development center at Hyderabad, India. The name of the center has been changed recently to United Online Software Development India Pvt. Ltd.

External links

Juno - Company website
Juno Email Clients - Information about how to extract mail and addresses from several versions of the Juno email client to other clients
juno_accmail - Discussion list for Juno users

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